Pink Palm Hotel Spotlights Sea Change For St. Thomas

The first all-new hotel build on St. Thomas in more than two decades is a sign of an ongoing creative resurgence in the Caribbean.

Diego is famous now. The exuberant basset hound that spent most of his life so far in New York is now an island boy. “He’s the only one we’ve seen,” says Brent Pelton, owner of the first all-new hotel build on St. Thomas in at least two decades. “There’s another dog up the hill that might be part basset but that’s about it.”

Diego is so famous that it didn’t take Pelton long to get word when the charismatic, 60-pound dog bounded down several hundred feet of sidewalk, over the cobblestone streets of Charlotte Amalie’s 17th-century downtown and over to the harbor front. “They found him at the government building,” adds Pelton, whirling a red Ford Bronco up the impossibly narrow, Dutch cart paths that today stand in as the island’s roads. As the Bronco takes one final, sharp left, Pelton arrives at the place where Diego is now on house arrest—the Pink Palm Hotel.

For the past several years, the Pink Palm has been Pelton’s passion project. Constructed from a drastically renovated 1940s guest house turned apartment complex adjacent to the local synagogue, the Pink Palm is a 27-room hanging garden of terraces, hideaways and hangouts. Diego escaped because the just-finished hotel had yet to install gates on its upper level, but Pelton says that issue has been remedied now. Even as the property welcomed its first official guests in February, crews of hospitality veterans from Pelton’s Greenport, New York property, American Beech were working double time alongside crews from St. Thomas to polish all of the Pink Palm’s bells and whistles.

After several years of substantial work: gutting the entire complex, redesigning it from the ground up, installing the hotel’s signature, green tile pool and adding a terrace restaurant, Pelton’s team busied themselves installing neon lighting in the lobby, planting a grove of banana trees near the future spa and installing the handmade, wooden gates up top. “Our bottom gate was actually made by My Brother’s Workshop,” adds Pelton, nodding to the hotel’s neighbors, a non-profit focused on providing skills (like woodworking and hospitality experience) to the island’s at-risk and high-risk youth.

Pelton does not fashion himself an islander yet. The New York-based hotelier and lawyer is well aware that parachute developers can both help and harm a community. But on St. Thomas, where the back-to-back battering of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 was followed by Dorian in 2019 and a petering global pandemic, the arrival of guests to the Pink Palm feels like a sign of a sea change.

After billions of dollars in damage caused by natural disasters and the pandemic, St. Thomas may be hitting a stride not seen since the 1980s.

In 2017, the lights of the 443-room Marriott Frenchman’s Cay—a beacon on the St. Thomas waterfront—went dark due to hurricane damage. The hotel remained closed until this year.

For centuries, the deepwater, Caribbean harbor in Charlotte Amalie welcomed traders and tourists from across the globe. By 2019, that figure reached 500,000 cruise passengers per year; but in 2020, the golden goose went down for the count due to COVID-19. From 2021 to 2022, the island saw just between 15-30% of its annual cruise capacity come to port. But by 2024, U.S. Virgin Islands officials believe numbers will rise to pre-pandemic levels.

And the tastes of tourists are changing. While cruise passengers disembark for day trips around St. Thomas on the island’s ubiquitous safari buses, Pelton believes the city of Charlotte Amalie itself is likely staged to draw to another kind of tourism dollar, overnight visitors that have not been seen in substantial numbers (at least not enough to keep many downtown shops from closing when cruise ships leave) in decades.

The city’s immaculate, 17th-century downtown has character. It looks like and feels like a movie set from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” But the place is real. In Charlotte Amalie, cafes, coffee shops and at least one stellar Sicilian restaurant (Virgilio’s) are crammed into buildings with brick walls thick enough to deter pirate raids. And the smattering of 1980s jewelry store tourist traps are giving way to a new generation of storefronts, like art galleries 81C and the Creative Native.

“I returned home in 2018,” says Creative Native owner Ama Dennis, a photographer, engineer and islander. “I’ve lived in upstate New York, but I didn’t care. I was just another person passing through New York like so many others. When I returned home, I wanted to do that with a purpose, which is to tell the story of the Virgin Islands through beautiful images. There is good and bad in every place you go, but sometimes people forget how beautiful it is right here.”

Dennis says many view St. Croix as the culture bearer of the Virgin Islands. Museums, galleries and archaeological exhibits dot the island 40 miles to the south. However, St. Thomas’s position as a trading port since the 1600s makes its own culture—a blend of indigenous, African, European, Latin America and Caribbean ideas, rhythms, colors and traditions—incredibly beautiful.

Charlotte Amalie has its own art, music and flavors worth savoring. Largely overlooked by cruise passengers checking another island off of their list, these gifts have the potential to resurrect a rare nightlife destination in the Caribbean.

That’s what Pelton saw here. In contrast to the more agricultural, more beach-centric St. Croix, St. Thomas offers visitors a glance at a city at sea. Uncounted miles of step paths connect Charlotte Amalie’s neighborhoods, carrying visitors over the literal, brick-laid steps of history. Direct flights from the U.S. mainland put travelers in this paradise within minutes of landing at Cyril E. King airport. Natural beauty still abounds in the underrated hiking trails and sublime coral reefs surrounding the island.

And though Charlotte Amalie only boasts a population of 18,100 inhabitants, the place can feel bustling in relation to its Caribbean neighbors.

For a time, that bustle was a significant lure for tourists to St. Thomas. From the mid-1960s into the 80s, St. Thomas was a popular destination for LGBTQ travelers from around the globe. The island was at one time home to the only Studio 54 outside of New York, and noted as a place where both gay and straight artists and creatives would converge to thrive.

“In the 70s and 80s, there was a big shift,” explains Jon Euwema, a multi-disciplinary artist involved in several of the island’s ongoing real estate projects, including a rum tasting room project revamping Charlotte Amalie’s 1841 Grand Hotel. “Things were happening back then. People were coming here from Puerto Rico for the weekend, instead of the other way around.”

By 1989, Hurricane Hugo and the global perception of AIDS put the brakes on St. Thomas’s momentum. Anti-LGBTQ lawmakers changed the dynamic of the island, kneecapping much of its creative fuel. But today, the tone is changing.

Euwema, who was raised in Charlotte Amalie, says government missteps discouraged creative culture on the island for much of the ensuing decades. But now, he also believes St. Thomas is a largely untapped pot of creative potential. “We have really talented people here. We have an amazing amount of talent, if we can figure it all out.”

At night, the stars can be seen from Charlotte Amalie. Far removed from the continents, little light pollution reaches even the city streets here.

Over the constant crows of roosters, the occasional barking of dogs and the frequent rhythms of a steel drum band reverberating around this one hound town, the twinkle of bistro lights can be seen halfway up a hill that has long lingered in the dark. Beneath those lights, travelers will find the friendly doors of the Pink Palm Hotel. The observant may spot a man and a dog standing beneath them on a railing. That will be Brent Pelton and Diego, welcoming guests to what may be a new era for St. Thomas and the historic, harbor city of Charlotte Amalie.